Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Literary Criticism General

Virginia Woolf

Music, Sound, Language

by (author) Elicia Clements

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Apr 2019
Category
General, Women Authors, 21st Century, 20th Century, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Feminist
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781487504267
    Publish Date
    Apr 2019
    List Price
    $63.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487519797
    Publish Date
    Apr 2019
    List Price
    $63.00

Add it to your shelf

Where to buy it

Description

Arguing that sound is integral to Virginia Woolf's understanding of literature, Elicia Clements highlights how the sonorous enables Woolf to examine issues of meaning in language and art, elaborate a politics of listening, illuminate rhythmic and performative elements in her fiction, and explore how music itself provides a potential structural model that facilitates the innovation of her method in The Waves.

 

Woolf's investigation of the exchange between literature and music is thoroughly intermedial: her novels disclose the crevices, convergences, and conflicts that arise when one traverses the intersectionality of these two art forms, revealing, in the process, Woolf's robust materialist feminism. This book focuses, therefore, on the conceptual, aesthetic, and political implications of the musico-literary pairing. Correspondingly, Clements uses a methodology that employs theoretical tools from the disciplines of both literary criticism and musicology, as well as several burgeoning and newly established fields including sound, listening, and performance studies. Ultimately, Clements argues that a wide-ranging combination of these two disciplines produces new ways to study not only literary and musical artifacts but also the methods we employ to analyze them.

About the author

Elicia Clements is a cross-appointed, associate professor in the Departments of Humanities and English at York University.

Elicia Clements' profile page

Editorial Reviews

"Elicia Clements in Virginia Woolf, Music, Sound and Language (2019) takes a deep dive into these relationships and argues that the concepts of sound and music enabled Woolf to develop a new understanding of her own writing and literature. This is new and exciting."

<em>Virginia Woolf Miscellany</em>

"Clements’s book explores Woolf’s sustained attention to the production and reception of sound, gathering together arguments about sonic events, art music, and language in Woolf’s work. Through her bold scope, astute close readings, and careful theoretical expositions, she provides a sophisticated account of the vital importance of sound production and reception to Woolf’s ethics and experimentation."

<em>Woolf Studies Annual</em>

Other titles by